“I still need to know I can get the hell out of here.”
Some version of that sentence keeps arriving in my inbox this fall. It isn’t about where. It’s about how fast. Is it time yet? Could we get out if we had to? Readers put the wish underneath it plainly: they want to stop doom-scrolling, and they want to know they can leave.
If you’ve felt that, you’re not paranoid, and you’re not alone. Wanting a way out is one of the most rational instincts a person with something to protect can have. It just needs a plan instead of a news feed.
They aren’t imagining the mood. By the Wall Street Journal’s count, at least 180,000 Americans moved to just fifteen countries last year, and Census Bureau data show emigration from the US rising. More people are doing this than at any point in decades, and plenty of them are doing it in a hurry.
Here’s my honest answer. Almost nobody I work with should leave tomorrow. Almost everyone should be able to. The distance between those two sentences is a few months of paperwork and a handful of decisions you can make now without committing to anything.
Here’s what ready looks like. A folder in the desk drawer. Inside it, two passports that won’t expire for years, apostilled birth and marriage certificates, a single page naming the visa you’d use and the numbers that qualify you for it, and a note of which documents go stale and when. A bank that knows you might live abroad and won’t close the account when you do. A Medicare decision you made on purpose. Nothing in your life has changed. You still have the house, the friends, the Sunday dinners. What’s changed is how you read the news.
The people who get hurt are the ones who try to close that distance in a week. Leaving fast and leaving badly are not the same thing, and the difference is almost entirely the order you do things in.